I’ve been a fan of the unmanned Mars missions ever since the slow-news July 4 weekend in 1997 when Pathfinder’s Sojourner found its way to Ares Vallis. The cable-news coverage of the mission charmed me then, a story that seemed to be about long-haired geeks – as opposed to the flat-top Cold Warriors who oversaw the Moon missions of my youth – hacking a skateboard onto another planet.

I vaguely remember that they played “Twist and Shout” inside the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when it was clear they’d stuck the landing.

The big takeaway from the missions seems to be hat their point is determining whether there’s life on Mars, and that’s a bit misleading.

“We often have to distill our the scientific goals and themes down to communicate them to the public,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Mars Science Laboratory deputy project scientist, during the Summer TV Tour in Hollywood. “And the disadvantage of that is it can get reduced to something like ‘Is there life on Mars?’ And if the answer is no, that could be a big disappointment. In fact, there’s been kind of a roller coaster in Mars exploration where that’s actually happened several times, claims of discoveries of life, only to be disappointed when more scrutiny is applied.

“One thing that we’re doing with this mission that’s, I think, really key to answering this issue is that we’re going to a place that’s going to unlock the first couple of billion years of Mars history, someplace like we’ve never seen before, where we’re going to understand how Mars evolved in its early history when we think there’s all this evidence of water and rivers and lakes and oceans.

“And it’s kind of a consolation prize because life would be the key result that will make us all famous. But on the other hand, we’re going to learn about this planet that evolved differently from Earth and yet had so many conditions similar to Earth. And that’s going to be a huge scientific prize.”

After a whirlwind four months culling reams of NASA footage and scrambling for interviews, the producers of NOVA’s Ultimate Mars Challenge--airing Nov. 14 on PBS--momentarily suspended their documentary mindset during Curiosity’s landing night at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) last August.

“I got so caught up in the drama of the landing, and felt so much for the guys and gals we’d interviewed who’d worked on the rover, it started to feel personal,” says Challenge director Gail Willumsen, who also produced the hour special with Jill Shinefeld through their Los Angeles-based Gemini Productions. “The drama of the adventure and achievement to get the technology and engineering to work millions of miles away, and the steps to getting this to land left little leeway for error. If it didn’t work, I was going to feel so bad for them. How it impacted the show was secondary.”

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has delivered the first Martian dirt sample to its onboard chemistry laboratory, testing out gear that forms the scientific heart of the $2.5 billion robot.

Curiosity's huge robotic arm dropped a pinch of Red Planet dirt into the rover's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM. SAM can detect organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it — and is thus key to Curiosity's mission, which seeks to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.

What has Curiosity been up to lately? The rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments makes up more than half the science payload on board MSL, and it is now searching for compounds of the element carbon—including the enticing methane that has been observed in Mars' atmosphere from telescopes and instruments on Earth. These are the elements that are associated with life, and SAM is trying to determine if methane can be detected from the surface, as well. So far, the rover has not found "definitive evidence" beyond data uncertainty of methane in Mars' thin atmosphere. But that doesn't close the door on the subject. It is still early in the mission, and the methane on Mars has been cyclical in nature.